Boxing: Kazakhstan’s Gennady Golovkin looking for rival for January 19

Kazakhstan professional boxer Gennady Golovkin (24-0, 21 knock-outs) continues looking for his would-be rival, Vesti.kz reports. The Kazakhstan’s World Boxing Association (WBA) champion is planning to be in the ring again on January 19.

American middleweight boxer Fernando Guerrero (25-1, 19 knock-outs) might become the next candidate for the bout against Gennady Golovkin. According to the American boxer, he approached Golovkin and negotiated a fight during the bout between Robert Guerrero and Andre Berto that was held in Ontario (USA, California) on Saturday, November, 24.

“We are going to fight. He said this already. We are going to see, who hits hardest. … They don’t need to look for anyone else. I am here,” Boxingscene.com cited Guerrero as saying.

Kazakhstan boxer needs to defend his titles on January 19, 2013 at Madison Square Garden in New-York (USA). However, the name of his rival is not known yet. According to Golovkin’s coach Abel Sanchez, the ultimate decision will depend on American HBO Channel that will air the bout.

“You know, there’s a list of them, who want to fight him, but they don’t put their name on the dotted line. And the bottom line is HBO has to approve the fight. It’s a matter of HBO accepting it and it being a competitive fight for the public,” Sanchez said.

Tom Loeffler, representative of K2 promotion company who represents Kazakhstan’s Golovkin, gave an interview to Sportbox.ru website and explained why the Kazakhstan boxer and WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin is still without a selected rival for January 19.

“I think that there are plenty of interesting fights ahead of Golovkin, however, it is hard to find opponents for him,” Loeffler said. “Australia’s Daniel Geale has chosen to fight against his fellow countryman Anthony Mundine and Russia’s Dmitry Pirog hasn’t fully recovered from his injury yet. Mexico’s Julio Cesar Chavez and Argentina’s Sergio Martinez are both arranging rematchs and are planning to fight against other boxers.”

Question: Geale said that he refused to fight because he was offered a “modest payment” for this fight against Golovkin. Is it true?

Answer: No, it is not. If this fight had taken place, the HBO Channel would have aired it. This TV Channel received good feedback after Gennady’s fight against Proksa and is ready to sign a contract with him. Therefore, the prize-money would correspond with the large-scale of the show. However, I understand Geale’s choice of Mundine. It was a business decision and this fight will bring him more money. But in my opinion Geale was responsible for his commitments. He had to fight against Pirog first. However, he waived off this bout in order to fight Sturm and for the latter it was an excellent chance to avoid a fight against Golovkin. WBA approved Sturm-Geale fight and ordered the winner of the bout to stand against the winner of Golovkin-Proksa bout.

Question: It looks like you’ve made a lot of efforts to promote Golovkin at the American market.

Answer: Yes, we have. Gennady’s dream is to fight in the USA and he considers America as one huge ring. He has got an excellent Soviet boxing school background and he was extremely successful when he was fighting as an amateur boxer. However, Golovkin can fight not only in the USA, but in Europe as well. We are planning to arrange fights for Golovkin in Russia and Kazakhstan in future.

Question: Could you name a boxer with whom Golovkin could unite the belts?

– We can’t charge off Geale, but this fight will become possible only after his fight against Australia’s Mundine and an obligatory defense that will follow it. It will be ideal if Martinez agreed to fight Gennady after a few bouts. He is a great champion who won a lot of serious matches in middleweight and super welterweight divisions. We have negotiated this with his team, but, evidently, his promoter is not interested in a fight against Golovkin at present. It seems, they realize that this might be a very tough fight for Martinez.

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Charles van der Leeuw, writer, news analyst, was born in The Hague, The Netherlands, in 1952. He started working as an independent reporter on cultural issues in a wide variety of publications back in 1977. Ten years later, he settled down in war-torn Beirut as an international war correspondent, following a first experience in Iraq in 1985, which resulted in his first book on the Iraq-Iran war. After his kidnapping and release in 1989, his second book “Lebanon – the injured innocence” came out, followed, in early 1992, by “Kuwait burns”. Later in the year, he settled down in Baku, Azerbaijan, as a war correspondent. “Storm over the Caucasus” on the southern Caucasus geopolitical conflicts came out in 1997 in the Dutch language and two years later in the first English edition. It was followed by “Azerbaijan – a quest for identity” and “Oil and gas in the Caucasus and Caspian – a history”, both published in 2000, and “Black & Blue” published in Almaty in summer 2003 about the stormy rise of Russia’s present-day oil and gas companies.
In 2012, he published a bipartite book about the histories of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. His latest publication before this work was “Cold War II: cries in the desert – or how to counterbalance NATO’s propaganda from Ukraine to Central Asia”, published by Herfordshire Press, England, along with books similar to this one on Kyrgyzstan, published in English, French and German editions.